I've read a fascinating bit of analysis, broadly about the phenomenon of NSA surveillance and missionary whistleblower crusades from Manning to Snowden, and I have nothing to add on the specifics of those cases or what to do about them: In all honesty, I don't care. Maybe some day "they'll come for me," but for the moment the fact is it's just too abstract a threat to motivate me. For good or ill, that's just how it is in my case. But that doesn't mean I don't find the implications of the phenomenon intellectually fascinating, hence my interest in the linked article - particularly the vague implication that surveillance was part of the motivation for the generous institutional support of the growth of the internet in the first place. That's probably nonsense, but it leads to some interesting thoughts.
Just to explain why I dismiss this idea out of hand, the first rule of everything is that no one is ever truly in control - the people who delude themselves that they are, are just hopscotching from one crisis to the next just like you, desperately trying to maintain the illusion that they have something you don't. The good news is, they don't. The bad news is, no one does or ever will, including the people who would change things for the better. No matter who you are, your choices are to be a cynical prick who wastes opportunities on petty self-interests and throw the dice that you achieve your Pyrrhic objectives, or to do your best for the world...and throw the dice that you achieve your benevolent objectives without the blowback being too severe.
The first time I heard about the NSA thing was a long time before Edward Snowden, and the ways that I knew it would be abused are exactly what turned out: Not suppression of political groups - institutions are many things, but they're not suicidal - but rather petty, personal things, like NSA employees spying on their girlfriends. Same old shit. Which is to say, you can go easy on the tinfoil - The Man is not plotting your demise. Institutions can spy on people until the cows come home without consequences, as the past 70 years of British history demonstrate, but the moment you try to turn that information into an exercise of power - via, for instance, blackmail - the information becomes a nitroglycerine bomb in very shaky hands. Real people in government know this instinctively, which is why they're still in government.
And the one guaranteed way to feed energy into a remotely justified political dissident group with any semblance of mass-appeal in a country with a democratic self-image (regardless of the dirty reality) is to actively suppress it. The only way a power elite can get around this paradox is to simply exterminate their opposition, and contrary to the Che Guevara t-shirt-wearing crowd, the United States has never been within light-years of that kind of abyss. If you don't want to admit that we're simply too moral to go that way, at least admit that we're too wedded to narcissistic fantasies of heroism - whatever comes of this country will still be riding the cargo cult of World War 2 a thousand years from now, still acting out the shallowest aspects of freedom regardless of our substance.
Basically, certain lines will not be crossed. Not because we're too good to cross them, but simply because circles don't give birth to triangles. There are certain types of oppression that this particular set of cultural and psychological traits can produce, and certain types that we enjoy tearing down far too much to tolerate except long enough to give ourselves something to destroy. Contrary to its own plans, its own culture of ironically camera-shy shenanigans, the NSA has identified itself as an almost completely irredeemable Enemy of what we as Americans believe ourselves to be. And now, it's fucked because of that. It will be less and less able to perform its function now.
The passionate hate and fear the NSA, the intellectual despise it, the demagogues demonize it, and regardless of what cynical motives underlay the reality of Silicon Valley, the NSA has stuck a giant prison-rapist dick up the ass of their heroic self-image. They've made people whose fantasies of technological progressivism are everything to them confront their own powerlessness. That will cost the NSA dearly. As an institution, the NSA is supposed to be the Eye that sees and is not seen - the latter half of which has already irrevocably failed, which is progressively causing the former half to become compromised.
But...that doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter which three-letter-acronym is looking at you, does it? NSA, CIA, DIA, NRO, DHS, etc? The NSA is no longer the predator - it's the prey. Bolder politicians will seek political capital by making a spectacle of confronting it, all while capitulating utterly to some other three-letter-acronym, giving it the same or greater powers as the ones they crush as part of political theater. This process will certainly take time to unfold, but it's as inevitable as the sunrise.
Part of what made the Soviet Union so stable over decades despite being such a nightmare was that the trifecta of the KGB, Red Army, and Communist Party were constantly one-upping each other and replacing each other as the scapegoat in the previous regime's crimes. The difference between that and what happens in a democracy is simply a matter of the degree of complexity - the number of players and the possible permutations of political theater.
So now I've gone from sounding Pollyanna-ish to sounding gruesomely cynical, right? But it just boils down to an old saw first articulated by Confucius: Wherever you go, there you are. Add to that this relatively newer understanding: The things that exist between people are not the same things as the people that describe their endpoints. So no matter what it is between people that you're describing - the institutions of Kafka and Orwell, or the technological abstractions of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson - there they are. Doesn't really matter if what's being spelled out in the interstices between individuals is inscribed on mountains of paper or electrons. The question remains unanswered: What are we together?
File cabinets made the bureaucratic totalitarian states of the 20th century, but it also made the democracies that destroyed them while refusing to become them. And no matter how much disgust you hold for the negative phenomena occurring in the 21st century Western world, you must admit it bears very few traces of what defined Nazism or Marxism. Our problems are new. That fact is both terrifying and consoling: New problems cannot necessarily be solved in old ways, but it serves as living evidence that the struggle is not futile - problems are never eliminated entirely, but their natures can be understood and evolved against. Otherwise, we would still all be toothless 20-year-olds throwing a spear into any stranger who wandered into our line of sight.
Essentially, the problems we face come from the fact that the internet is a platform that both unifies human beings and accelerates the passage of information between them: Humanity, whatever our collective entity is, imposes itself more profoundly upon our individual existence in new ways while echoing the conflicts of similar developments in the paper- and broadcast-based 20th century. But, you may object, it's not the mass of human beings that are deciding the shape of this thing, but rather a minority - well, the same is true of you, isn't it? It's just the cells that end up as nerves that really define your existence, and everything else is just an enabling mechanism.
When you think about it, it's actually pretty horrifying: Your nerve cells are a kind of totalitarian empire that tells everything else what to do and when to do it, orders other cells to commit suicide when they've outlived their usefulness, and the greatest Enemy is cancer - the cellular version of individualism. Cancer cells basically "decide" (metaphorically) that existing for the benefit of some abstract entity (you) is no longer worthwhile, and just start living for themselves - eating what they want, propagating uncontrollably, and accepting no check on their activities. Their struggle actually sounds heroic when articulated in these terms, doesn't it? Unfortunately for them, billions of years of evolution produced you, and you want to continue existing.
So what happens when evolution unites billions of human beings into a single (or a handful of) singular entity(/ies) that are connected at lightspeed - basically the natural conclusion of the internet? Orwell imagined the most nightmarish version of this in 1984; Arthur C. Clarke imagined an equally terrifying and hopeful conception in Childhood's End (compare the telepathic hive-mind children in this vision to kids today with their phones); and Isaac Asimov imagined a compassionate, ecology-based version as Gaia in Foundation's Edge. Of course, none of these visions is mutually exclusive, nor are they exclusive of the continuation of individuality. All that exists, will continue to exist in some form. Evolution never throws away anything it ever finds convenient.
But the question remains, what kind of creature is Humanity? Just because a bunch of humans are one way doesn't mean Humanity is the same. What sort of shape will the world assume when under the direction of the self-selected "brain cells" of our collective nervous system, both spying on and interfering in the information we receive, no doubt in unstable balance with those who demand greater freedom? There's no reason that our Web will not give birth to its own proverbial Spider - a monster made of us and all we do, and a nightmare from which we cannot awake. At least temporarily. But life is never that simple over any extended period of time.
Always there are edges at which possibilities froth. Always the next iteration is kind of better than the last. The horrors of the Huns and Mongols were so complete in their respective ages that we can't possibly appreciate them today - their actions on the face of humankind were so evil and complete that there is nothing against which to judge them. But we know the Nazis for the monsters they were because they occurred against such a backdrop of human progress that the contrast was inescapable - even compared to the bloodthirst of the Kaiser's Germany they were demons. Yet if they had existed in the era of Attila and Khan, no one would have noticed or cared. Things always advance - even if the progress has to sneak in under the radar.
So I'm more curious than frightened to know where we go with this. The nervous system of humanity will inevitably develop its self-selected controllers; will inevitably develop along more complicated lines than the undifferentiated, sponge-like mass that a simplistic democratic idealist would prefer to imagine; but that control will inevitably be contested by more distributed entities than the simple, centralized institutions that will certainly attempt to exert total control. But seriously, why be less afraid of a future where everything you know comes from either totalitarians or anarchists? Are the latter more trustworthy? Can reality be found in averaging the two pathologies? Or, why be afraid of any future, knowing that it will inevitably change regardless of what it is?
I think my more important point is to understand that the form of the struggle is a new medium, but the nature is a continuing process that occurred in radio waves and on paper, and well before that in stone and in spoken words and songs. And the only thing - the only thing - that can possibly come out of it is the truth: Who we fundamentally are as a species, and what life fundamentally is as a phenomenon. More importantly, that fact is undecided, and thus open to contributions from each of us in determining the outcome. Are we members of the Human family, growing closer toward a fluid unity where individuality flows into and out of consensus freely, or cellular constituents of a Lexx-like Gigashadow that propagates only by devouring?
The answer, of course, is both. Both, simultaneously, in both tension and harmony, punctuated by cataclysmic conflicts and dimpled with countless minor skirmishes. The same tensions will evolve far beyond this current transition into additional media and forms we do not presently conceive, because that is the nature of life and evolution. I offer my limited vote as a single human being for a democratic and humanistic future, but am humble enough to know that I can be bought by a sufficiently alluring combination of luxury and covenience.
Fortunately, no level of oppression is possible that is complete enough to buy everyone that needs to be bought, or terrorize everyone that needs to fear, or do the things forever that need to be done for a negative condition to persist. If you form a perfect diamond of nightmare-tyranny, life will simply move around it and turn it into something innocuous and past-tense, like Sparta. Where is that glorious jewel of sadism and murder now? A comic-book and a movie staffed with Scottish actors. Where is the Soviet bootheel stomping on the human face forever? Reduced to the pathetic, groan-inducing machinations of pseudo-democratic Prick-tator Vladimir Putin.
So what are you afraid of from the NSA? That they're going to sell evidence of your philandering to your ex-wife's attorney if you criticize them? Get over yourself - this is not a real problem. If you are any sort of real human being, that sort of shit would just make you more determined to rip them to shreds. The NSA is screwed. Any institution that allows itself to become defined as intrinsically violating the public trust has no future, no matter how lackadaisical the resistance to it appears to people who eat and breathe outrage.
The problem you need to concern yourself is what you are when you're more than yourself - when your instincts are magnified to the size of groups, multiplied by those of likeminded people, unchecked by the thoughtful restraints that hold back ordinary human behavior, and allowed to propagate at the speed of light. What are you then? What does your will become, translated into a medium without immediate conscience but capable of immediate action? Keep in mind the wisdom of Plato: The internet is simply another cave wall, and ultimately nothing projected on it comes from anywhere but you.
Only you know what that means, and only you can choose what part of it to emphasize. What of you do you spread out into the aether? Fear? Hope? Rage? Love? Curiosity? Here is what I choose to use the internet for, what I choose to convey to you: Knowledge of your inherent freedom. I hope I've explained it well enough to mean something.